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Check out FeedOnFeeds if you have your own web server. You can access the same content from home or work for reading your feeds. I have a reblog patch that lets you mark articles for including in a feed of your own.

I find it very useful for keeping up with rarely updated Sourceforge projects as SF has feeds for all announcements done for a project. Web comics, news, entertainment, etc. Who wants to waste time going to web sites to see if they've updated? One look at your feed reader will show you what's new, leaving you time for reading more content, or just plain doing something else.

I think the new RSS wheel finally wins this one. I never got into IE Channels or Pointcast because it was all about geewhiz graphics and not enough about the content. Now I subscribe to 60+ feeds, which I read through Feed On Feeds which I always keep in the first tab of Firefox (thanks, Mini-T). The feeds are exactly what I want: only one inserts advertisement-only content (SpaceDaily through that damn NewsIsFree), the other handful that advertise are smart enough to use Google RSS adverts.

Because browsing around hundreds of web sites for news is a pain in the ass. Let the information flow to YOU. It's all about structuring the info so you can do more with it beyond simple screen scraping.

I'm not talking about just Dilbert comics or other entertainment outlets. Imagine notification of software updates. Email is lousy for this sort of thing when you get hundreds of emails per day. It's not searchable and it sits in your own account. Another benefit of RSS is control over the lists. You ever get an email from someone you know that didn't really come from someone you know, yet had a nice virus payload attached? This doesn't do that. Any info that comes from the RSS channel is something YOU have subscribed to and unsubscribing is dead easy.

Further, with an RSS Reader I use called Feed On Feeds, you can access its mySQL backend from any other software to do what you want with the information streams. There are many other readers that use this same philosophy. If you MUST have mailing lists, well, then mail out from there; not all of these sites have mailing lists and this would make a great way to present it in that format. You can reblog select posts, or a channel combining a number of other channels.

Web-based interfaces are the only way RSS should be done, unless you use one computer everywhere to access your feeds. Otherwise you're just spending time syncing your list between computers and trying to figure out which stories you read last out of each feed. When you're talking about 50+ feeds, this is a major pain. I use FeedOnFeeds for my web based reader, preferring the slim interface that FoF provides over Bloglines. You can even add a republish patch to check off select articles to instantly roll into a feed of your own.

The point, however, is that with such an interface it doesn't matter what web browser or OS you are using, similar to when you access Gmail.

I love the Google Mail interface for reading mail, but as a feed reader it just won't cut it. I would rather use something like FeedOnFeeds in frame mode for best text density. I even use a republish patch to reuse the feed reader to publish select links. Since everyone from CNN to Sourceforge uses RSS feeds to distribute articles, I never ever have to go randomly browsing for content. Either it's in the reader or it isn't published yet.

Unless I can see the same feeds in the same status from any location regardless of whether my home computer or work computer is on or even nearby, it is inconvenient. That's why I use a web-based feed reader such as Feed On Feeds. If I go to the nephew's house, I don't have to try to remember all my feeds to configure his aKregator (stupid stupid name, folks) for my tastes. Local aggregators are plain dumb except for those people that explicitly divide their home and work lives and can maintain two or more separate feed lists, or those that just need a single place to view their news.

The FoF interface is very simple and really useful, and with my patch you can even republish select articles from mixed feeds to another RSS feed.

Since you can't use CitiBank with Mozilla, I won't lose any sleep over it.

You know, the ONE site I use that I am unable to disable Javascript for is my installation of Feed on Feeds. I wish I could completly disable JS, except for when I access FoF.

Check out Feeds on Feeds - another PHP-based RSS aggregator.

So how do you sync this between similar installs at home and work? Instead, I use a web-based reader like Feed On Feeds so that I can pick up at home where I left off at work and vice versa.

Anything web based. Set up Feed On Feeds on any Apache/PHP/mySQL system to get Usenet-like access and marking to the same feeds. Most others (including Yahoo's RSS service) do not do this marking which means you see the same topics over and over in the same feed. Sure, you can ignore the old stories, but realize that some feeds post dozens of items per day and that's a lot to remember.

RSS is a natural evolution of using the Web. Why constantly scour web sites for updates when you can subscribe to a feed from EWeek or Sourceforge or Penny Arcade and see the update shortly after it appears? I always keep Feed On Feeds open in a mozilla tab.

Feeds on Feeds is a web-based, PHP/MySQL-driven news reader: get it here. The interface isn't much, but it works.